No Way Home (24 page)

“I’m on duty.”

“You’re going home. That’s an order.”

Snapping to mock attention, MacGregor saluted. “Yes, sir. You’re the boss, you’re the commander. You’re Sherlock Holmes.”

They trudged along, Morgan in the lead, to the dimly lit parking lot behind the town hall. Morgan went to Meg O’Brien’s old Plymouth, to the passenger side. He flung open the door. “Get in, I’ll drive you home.”

“Then where
are you
going?”

The Plymouth had a small knock in the motor. A single headlight affirmed the road, though Morgan could have driven it blind. This god-damn town of his. He knew every inch, where women still hung clothes on the line, where the young left their tissues and the elderly their tears, where his boyhood had ended with his father’s death and his manhood had begun with his marriage, each spot marked sweet and sour. He glanced at MacGregor, whose smile was unsavory.

“I had you pegged, Chief. You got to her, didn’t you?”

This was what he had been dreading. He had no defense and no explanation except a weak one. “It just happened, Matt. Neither of us planned it, that’s the truth.”

“I don’t want the truth. The truth doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. Give me a big fucking lie, make me feel better.”

The response made him feel worse and even more so when he pulled up at MacGregor’s house, where beer cans glinted in the uncut grass near the porch, where the light had been left lit for two days. A single can, squashed in the middle, stood cockeyed on the rail. He said, “Here we are.”

MacGregor shoved the door open and got out, no argument, only a heavy grunt of exertion, which brought another belch, this one unintentional. He closed the door, but not securely. In a way that was almost graceful, he crouched down to peer in. “You’re having what I had, Chief. Now you know why I’m nuts about her.”

Morgan shifted into gear. “Good night, Matt.”

“Want me to tell you what she likes best?”

The car fled. Too fast. He had not meant to push the accelerator that hard, and he slowed down. The night sky was brilliant. Every star seemed close. The lights were on at Lydia’s. She must not have gone to work, or else she was back early.

The steps creaked. Instead of ringing the bell, he gave a light tap on the door and waited. Not long. She opened it and peered out at him. She was in the old robe, and her face was drawn, her streaky brown hair unbrushed. She spoke quietly and firmly:

“Not tonight, James.”

• • •

The telephone, ringing insistently, woke him from a snoring sleep, and he battled a tangled sheet to free his legs and then, swinging out a blind arm into the dark, sent a little table lamp crashing to the floor. Moving on bare feet, he cut himself on shivers from the broken bulb. Senses battered, he clawed the wall in the passageway and produced a light that pained his eyes. Tracking blood, he groped his way into the vacant room, where the phone continued to shrill.

“Hello!”

A voice said, “Ready to clear your conscience, MacGregor?”

His eyes shuttered tight. “Fuck you, Bakinowski! Fuck you and your mother too!” Then he ripped the cord free and threw the phone against the wall.

10

Chief Morgan woke early to another day of heat. Someone else was up early. A neighbor with a full-mouthed voice that jarred ears was calling her dog, a mongrel Morgan sometimes wished would run away and never come back. Had it been a shepherd he might have thought more of it, though he had got rid of his after Elizabeth’s death. Happily, for years the animal had had the run of Tish Hopkins’s farm, where it expired behind a chicken coop after a full life.

He made coffee and carried a cup out to the car. He still had Meg O’Brien’s Plymouth. The mongrel, back, barked at him. Birds gusted from the neighbor’s maple. It was not yet seven o’clock. Driving with purpose, relishing his coffee, he was doubly aware of himself and of the tiny beats in the misty air, of the vigor of the emerging green, of the ready-for-business appearance of every tree, from which light dripped like water. This was his day, he knew it!

He parked the car off the road, near the Rayball mailbox, and finished his coffee. Two swallows did it. Then he got out and, avoiding ruts, ambled up the gravel drive toward the weather-bitten house. He picked a berry on the way. A mosquito seeking a meal whined in his ear. He killed it.

Papa’s pickup was there, Clement’s rental was not, which was what he had expected. Without the slightest sound he crept to the side of the house, to the window he knew was Junior’s, and peered through the blighted screen, where he smelled broken sleep. Junior was awake. He had almost expected that too. “It’s me,” he whispered and watched Junior nod from the bed. “Where’s your father?”

“Sleepin’,” Junior whispered back, a willing partner in the conspiracy.

“Can you come out? We don’t want to wake him.”

Junior had slept half dressed, and it took him no time to put on the rest. He put naked feet into stinking socks and into frayed sneakers. Lifting the screen, careful of sound, he came out through the window. Then, without speaking, they slipped far from the house to the green shadows of pines full of bird clatter, where Morgan said, “What happened to your lip?”

“I hurt it.”

“What do you want to know about your mother?”

Junior spoke as if with a taste of torment in his mouth, nothing to wash it out. “It was you that found her. Can you show me where?”

Morgan’s composure was granite, though his eyes blinked. This was going too well. He did not want to spoil anything.

“Clement and me used to look, but we didn’t know for sure where. We used to guess.”

“I’ll show you,” Morgan said.

They slid off toward the swamp, with the ground quickly giving in to uncertainty. What once might have been a path heaved up roots, beneath which water began to sparkle. They stepped around a rotting stump emerald with lichen, a mysterious growth that was part one thing and part another. Were they there for something else, Morgan might have explained the chemical mystery to him, which is what he would have done with his own child had Elizabeth lived long enough to give him one.

Junior pointed. “We used to think it was there.”

“No,” Morgan said, though he was quickly realizing he had no idea where it was and that one place might be as good as another. Birds and insects decorated the morning silence, weaving their own kinds of words into it. Morgan’s eyes roved. One spot looked likely, another less likely.

Junior said, “Clement said it was farther in.”

“Not too far.” The brush was rife with mosquitoes, which Morgan kept swatting. Junior stepped where it was quaggy and soaked his sneakers. After all these years, with new growth burgeoning and the old dying, it was impossible to tell where anything was. “Here,” Morgan said.

Junior went down on his knees in the wet.

“No, not there,” Morgan said. “I meant, here.” And with an emotion he could not explain, a sadness that should not have been his, he watched Junior move on his knees from the wet to the dry. It was too dry.

“How could she of drowned here? There’s no water.”

“There used to be,” Morgan said softly.

Junior whispered, “Mama.”

Morgan said, “Do you want me to go away for a while?”

“No.” He got up, his jeans plastered to his knees. “Now I know, I can come back by myself. I can even show Clement.”

“You never knew her, did you, Junior? You weren’t much more than a baby.”

“I had a dream. I saw her face.”

“She was a good woman, Junior.” Morgan was measuring his words. Each one had to cut. “She never hurt anyone. Nor did Mrs. Lapham.” As he spoke, Junior’s eyes went down, where the ground had become sacred. “I don’t blame you, Junior, not for what happened to either of them. I blame your father.”

“Not for Mama. Mama did it herself.”

“Are you sure?”

“I don’t know how to be sure,” he said. “I got no way.” Black flies appeared from nowhere and scratched the air. Morgan spoke through them. “Did you shoot Mrs. Lapham?”

“No sir.”

Morgan spoke fast. “But maybe you were there. I mean, maybe. We’re not talking for sure.”

“Yes sir, maybe.”

“Maybe you even had the gun in your hands. A rifle, wasn’t it?”

Junior’s eyes came up. “Yes sir, a nice one.”

“Maybe you even had your finger on the trigger.”

“A little.”

“You heard the shot.”

“I thought it’d be bigger.”

A happiness flooded Morgan. A sweet epiphany. Everything he had figured was true, everything imagined was real. “You did it, Junior.”

“No sir.”

OK, he was simply going too fast. An easy remedy. He’d skip over this and come back later. He slowed his voice. “Where’s the rifle now?”

“We threw it away.”

“You and Papa?”

“Yes sir, me and Papa.”

Morgan’s voice went fast again, he couldn’t help it. “Where?”

“I can’t tell.”

“But not here? You didn’t throw it away here?”

“No sir.”

“Maybe you threw it in Paget’s Pond.” Junior’s face reddened. “No sir, not there.”

“Where, then?”

“I can’t tell!” Junior said, and all of a sudden his breathing was disjointed. Simultaneously something clicked in Morgan’s brain, something spoke to him out of his own bone and blood. He was looking not at a killer but simply at a boy who had never become a man, at a half-man who had been a stunted child. He was seeing, in another kind of epiphany, two sides of a human equation.

“You didn’t do it, did you, Junior?”

The breathing was still harsh, raspy, not under full control. “No sir.”

“Papa fired the rifle, not you.”

“I ain’t say in’!”

“Tell me!”

“I can’t!” Junior shouted and began sinking to his knees, this time involuntarily, his breath going, his eyes leaping. Then he was on his back, thrashing, turning another color, not a pretty one. Morgan was beside him in a moment and cursing himself. What in Christ had he done? What kind of bottle had he unstopped? He grabbed Junior and did what he could.

• • •

When they emerged from the swamp, insects shrilling in their wake, Papa Rayball was sitting on a stump and eating cold cereal from a cracked bowl. He was wearing an old red shirt with the sleeves hacked off above the elbows. Slurping from the bowl, he looked like a hunter who feasted on his game and relished the umbles. Morgan, anticipating rage, saw a smile, one almost of triumph.

“What’ve you been doin’ to my boy? He don’t look so good.”

“He’s all right now,” Morgan said as Junior hung back.

“I don’t know, I got my suspicions,” Papa said. “Maybe you got so many women, you want boys now. You sure you’re all right, Junior?”

“Yes, Papa.”

“You know if the chief put his hands on you, you got a case against him. ‘Course, it’d be your word against his, and yours ain’t worth spit.” Papa winked, with cunning in his open eye. “Ain’t that right, Chief? Who’s gonna listen to a retard? I mean about
anything
?”

With a grimace of distaste Morgan said, “If you touch him, Papa, if you hurt him, I’ll bring an assault charge. I’ll also tell Clement.”

“What do I wanna hurt him for? He’s my boy, same as Clement, just that one’s brighter than the other. Junior knows that.”

With a parting look at Junior, Morgan turned and strode away, raising yellow dust when he reached the gravel drive. Papa watched every step with fiery blue eyes. He ate a little more from the bowl and heaved the remains into the poison ivy. When he looked at Junior, his face had darkened and contracted.

“What did you tell him?”

“Nothin’, Papa. I had a fit.”

“Good.”

Matt MacGregor woke at nine. He would have slept until noon had the sun not shot through the window and struck him full in the face. He might have gone back to sleep were his cut foot not throbbing. He suspected bits of broken bulb were still in it. Sitting on the closed toilet seat, the foot propped on his other knee, he did his best to get the shivers out. Some he could not even see.

Shaved and showered, his head feeling no better than it should have, he dressed in civvies and told himself there was nowhere to go but up. In his mother’s room, the bed unslept in since Memorial Day when she had left for the Cape, he picked up the telephone and shook it for damage. He did not want to think how he would repair the torn dent in the wall. “Jesus, Ma,” he said aloud, “if you only knew.” As he was leaving the room, the phone rang.

He snatched it up with glee. He had a whistle and was ready to blow it in the bastard’s ear. But the voice was not Bakinowski’s. He did not even recognize it at first. It seemed years since he had heard it. It was alien.

“All right,” he said. “You say where.”

• • •

Clement Rayball, breakfasting late, looked up from his
USA Today
, scowled, and said, “How did you know I was here?”

“How many good motels around here are there?” Chief Morgan said.

“What name did you ask for?”

“I didn’t. I described you. You’ve got eyes like a sniper’s, did you know that?” Morgan drew a chair. “Mind if I sit down?”

Clement folded away his newspaper and began eating his scrambled eggs and sausages. He used his cutlery in the European fashion, his fork in his left hand and his knife in his right, no need to put either down. “You want breakfast?”

“Coffee will do.”

The waitress was already pouring.

“Thank you, Milly, a little more for me too,” he said, and the young waitress obliged in a manner that verged on love. He said to Morgan, “Did you read the sports pages yet? Sox fined Crack Alexander for not showing up for yesterday’s game.”

“I read he’s got a bum ankle.”

“He was still supposed to be there. They fined him and suspended him. They don’t need him, anyway. He’s washed up. What do you want to see me about, Morgan?”

Morgan tasted his coffee. It was strong, fragrant, better than what he was used to. He took his time, for there no longer seemed to be a rush. “Junior and I had a talk. He’s told me things, some things I knew all along. Now I need your help.”

“You need my help, huh?” Clement pointed his knife. “You wired, Morgan? No, you’re not that sophisticated. Besides, what good would it do you? What kind of help do you want from me? The kind that will put my brother away?”